Wearable devices and other Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices have recently become a very hot topic. Wireless multimedia wearable devices, such as Google Glass® and the like, iWatch® and the like, and miniature wireless earbuds and cameras have ignited the imaginations of many millions of people around the world. They can potentially provide superior user experience while still being small and easy to carry; and autonomous and environmentally friendly (lower radiation at the user's proximity and carrying smaller toxic batteries).
Battery capacity is a major obstacle for a successful wearable multimedia design. Given the small form-factor required, the battery size, and thus capacity, is heavily constrained. A wireless connectivity device within such a wearable multimedia design may typically be one of the most power-hungry building blocks; to wit, a cellular network device or a wireless local-area network (WLAN) connectivity device can drain the largest wearable fully-charged battery to date within two hours of talk time. Including video, the largest wearable fully-charged battery is drained in less than 30 minutes.
Use of a WLAN as a means by which a multimedia device accesses the network may impose additional drawbacks. Typically, only small numbers of multimedia users, spread across a substantially large area, can conduct reliable high QoS (Quality of Service) multimedia sessions concurrently, due to fundamental WLAN media access limitations. As result only 5% of the WLAN capacity may end up being utilized. As result, the wired infrastructure is in most cases underutilized, while the cellular infrastructure is congested in many cases (e.g. schools).
Use of Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications (DECT) technology as a means by which a multimedia device accesses the network, provides a partial solution to the problems presented above (power consumption, underutilized wireline infrastructure) by potentially decreasing the mobile device's power consumption and supporting more users concurrently. However, it is not compatible with billions of existing consumer connectivity devices (e.g. Bluetooth® and WLAN), is expensive to integrate due to having multiple bands of operation and has a protocol stack that is optimized for voice.
The Bluetooth® low-power connectivity solution, on the other hand, makes it the favorite candidate for being the connectivity standard of choice for wearable multimedia devices and other small-form-factor battery-driven devices. It can support multiple hours of talk time before draining even the smaller batteries and has a minimal data throughput sufficient for basic-rate multimedia sessions. However, reducing the power consumption does not come without a drawback: as the small device's radiated power is decreased to ˜2 mW, and being more susceptible to frequency selective fading, the Bluetooth® signal cannot be received beyond 10 meters indoors (2-3 walls on average), 20 meters in office environments (no walls) and up to 30 meters outdoors, when using low-cost transceivers.
Smartphones (or other handheld devices (e.g., tablet computers) and personal computers) may be used also as a personal wireless bridge, assisting the low-power, now dependent, Bluetooth® devices in communicating via at least one of the wireless networks, such as, but not limited to, cellular networks or wireless LANs. The smartphone's small form factor enforces implementation of co-existence techniques (for example, Bluetooth®/WLAN time sharing) that may potentially further degrade the network performance and may limit the Bluetooth® device range due to not having multi-antenna communications capability.
It may, therefore, be desirable to develop systems/environments in which multiple users may be able to use small and low power devices, such as Bluetooth®-enabled devices, without the need for a smartphone or other portable, but larger, device to be carried along as a bridge device, and yet to still be able to communicate multimedia content concurrently, at an extended range and for long durations of time before draining the small battery, via WLANs or other wired or wireless networks (e.g., wireless wide-area networks (WWANs)), or broadcasted multimedia (e.g., broadcast radio, TV, media players).